La Frontera: Money, Drugs, People, & Guns

Watching the Biden Administration re-enact a scene from the Marx Brothers Duck Soup movie the other day prompted me to pen this overly long post. My apologies. I hope to keep it informative and entertaining despite its length.

Why Duck Soup you ask? Because of the absurdity of the claims made. On a single day, DHS Secretary Mayorkas said he had to act to waive several federal environmental regulations which prohibited construction of additional border wall along the US-Mexican border. OK, why? Because under American appropriations law, the money had to be spent for that, as that it is what it was designated for back in 2019 under the Trump administration. And now the money would expire if it wasn’t spent. So far, so good. All this is true. Then he went on to explain that there is a migrant crisis at the border, which justifies waiving the environmental regulations. Over 100,000 parents traveling with children crossed the border last month, an all-time record. Ummmm, but, well, that new border wall is only a few tens of miles long, and it’s not popping up overnight, but hey, ok, we’re still good.

Except the Secretary could have just refused to waive the environmental regulations, and what would have happened? The money would not have been lost: it just would not have been spent. Money we didn’t have (remember, all this is deficit spending, as we have been running a deficit annually for decades now) would not have been spent. So there must be a real migrant crisis, and the wall must help, right?

Except President Biden repeated Mayorkas’ claims about “havng to build the wall,” then added ‘No, a wall does not work.’ Then Mayorkas had to backtrack and agree with the President, but continue to claim he “had to spend the money.” Which was false. Which means the administration realizes it is under political pressure from all sides about the border and immigration, and it would rather lie and look like it’s doing something, even if that something doesn’t do anything in the President’s opinion.

Hence Duck Soup.

To figure all this out, you need to know politics, appropriations law, immigration trends, and some international economics/trade. Hence the administration thought they could get away with it. Even mainstream media uncritically reported the claim “the money had to be spent.” If there is appropriated money which expires, but it is prohibited by other federal law from being spent, it does not have to be spent. Period.

La frontera, the border in Español, is a fraught topic. Unlike the Canadian-American border, which is far longer and still practically unregulated, the Mexican-American border is freighted with much history. It’s still the most permeable international membrane in history, with good reason. What crosses it is what makes it so important, so difficult to address, and so likely to make fools of idealists, politicians, and demagogues. And what crosses it in order of importance are money, drugs, people, and guns.

MONEY

For two centuries, la frontera was much like any other border: a sleepy land of lines where laws changed and nothing much else. There were national rivalries, some crime, an occasional invasion or raid, and that’s it. America grew into a world power and Mexico remained in the immortal words of Porfirio Diaz “so far from God, and so close to the United States.” Mexico advanced economically, too, but remained deeply entrenched in what was then-called the Third World. Then NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, happened. NAFTA integrated the American, Canadian, and Mexican economies to an unprecedented degree.

H. Ross Perot was right about one thing: the giant sucking sound you heard was jobs moving to Mexico. What he got wrong was the notion that there are a finite number of jobs and when Mexico gained one, America lost one. The effect on Mexico was profound, and its economy grew immensely, now the 14th largest in the world. Yes, some American business sectors suffered mightily, and individual Americans lost jobs in those sectors, but that was inevitable. All NAFTA did was decide who the winners were: China, Korea, Vietnam or Mexico. NAFTA picked Mexico. And all that did was make Mexico into a stable economy, give it a middle-class, and reduce the flow of Mexican migration into America. Pretty good deal, no?

Another effect was to make Mexico and America inevitably into each other’s largest trading partners, with thousands of business sectors where parts of the final product or service are seamlessly produced and assembled without legal friction. Our economies are integrated, and like Siamese twins, they can’t be easily disentangled. China tried to do it, and almost did, but the political and economic fall-out of the pandemic made American officials realize that friend-shoring (i.e., trading with close, friendly countries you can rely on) is essential. You don’t want to find out that all your medical gear and drugs are made by the angry country that might have just caused the pandemic, do you?

One last thing about money at the border. Because of historic migration trends and the continuing need for migrant labor, there are many ethnic Mexicans living in the United States. How many? Thirty-seven million approximately, making them one of the largest ethnic contingents in the American melting pot. And since la familia is everything in Mexican culture, they send money home to la familia. Called remittances, Mexicans in America used digital wire services to send a record sixty billion US dollars home to Mexico last year, amounting to four percent of Mexico’s GDP.

In summary, more money transits la frontera than any border in world history. It is uniquely permeable, and both countries have spent a lot of time and effort to make business work effortlessly across it. No one can stop that for long, or change it significantly, without changing the basic structure of both nations’economies. And since it works so well, no one really wants to. The European Union has spent five decades trying to build something similar with mixed results. The United States and Mexico did it without really trying.

DRUGS

Believe it or not, the second most important thing crossing la frontera is drugs, and that is actually a subset of the money/trade aspect. Illegal narcotics are essentially just another product/service, wanted by some, provided by others. When something is legal or permitted in one place, but illegal or prohibited in another, clever people find a way to move it from one to the other to make money.

I am going to say something that will make my conservative American friends a little angry. The problem with drugs is not Mexico. It is America. Now for my liberal friends? The solution to drugs is not their decriminalization or legalization. The solution to drugs is ending American demand.

Mexico is only the focus of drug trafficking because of the fact of la frontera. Anybody who watched the original Netflix Narcos series knows the original cartels were Colombian, and the Mexicans were only middlemen who figured out how to muscle in on the business. Now the Mexican cartels are the biggest players, and that has caused untold death and mayhem in Mexico. Believe me when I say the vast majority of Mexicans would gladly accept the end of the reign of narcotraficantes, and in fact pray for it every day. No one is winning here.

Like any market, the drug trade has changed over time, responding to the changing consumer tastes in America. What started as mules (human and equine) carrying marijuana bales over mountain passes led to bricks of cocaine loaded in submarines and to packages of meta-amphetamine hidden in truck engines. Now the narcos have moved their dope-growing into America as individual states relax possession laws and the cartels focus on fentanyl. Why fentanyl? It’s an advanced, synthetic (nothing to grow), pain-reducing, euphoria-producing opioid, a miracle of modern medicine. Except it’s also highly addictive, cheap and easy to produce, and incredibly lethal in even tiny doses. A gram of fentanyl is fifty times more powerful than pure heroin, and there are versions one-hundred times more powerful than that. Added to other drugs, it increases the effects at zero-additional cost. Except those adding it along the supply chain don’t know who has added how much, so you get a record of over 100,000 America accidental overdose deaths in 2022.

Now you might think the cartels would NOT want to kill off their customers, but being the good businessmen they are, they realized long ago that American demand for drugs is what economists call “inelastic.” That is, no matter how much it costs in money, violence, death, or misery, there is unlimited continuing demand. So throw another fentanyl brick on the Bar-B! And how easy is it to produce? You need the raw materials, which are basically powders, and a pill or brick-making machine which is about the size of a home coffee pot. So when politicians start talking about taking out the fentanyl labs, stop listening, because they are speaking gibberish.

Why can’t America stop the drugs from entering? Too much legitimate trade crosses the border every day. We would have to stop the economy to stop the drugs. The drugs are too easy to hide, too easy to change transit methods (mules, slingshots, submarines, drones, trucks, tchotchkes, tourists, day-trippers, etc.), too easy to write off if they’re discovered, and it’s even too easy to bribe US Customs and Border Protection personnel. If Mexico disappeared tomorrow, we’d have the Canadian cartels to deal with the day after tomorrow. As the decriminalization and legalization experiment in the various states plays out, we will only change where and how America experiences its drug-induced misery and death. Until Americans stop craving drugs.

There is a final, cautionary note. Late in the 18th and early 19th century, The British Empire brought the Chinese Middle Kingdom to its knees, literally. It did so with the strength of the Royal Navy, the economic power of industrialization, and the subversive provision of opium, of which the Chinese simply couldn’t get enough. The leaders and the led in China gave up territory (e.g., Hong Kong, Macao), sovereignty , and their dignity, leading to what the Chinese called the Century of Humiliation. Current Chinese President Xi has called his efforts to lead China the fitting rejoinder to the lost hundred years. Is it any wonder the Chinese see the delicious irony in providing fentanyl precursors (and other drugs) to the cartels for sale to America?

PEOPLE

While desperate videos of asylum-seekers picking their way through razor-wire capture our current attention, the flow of people is only the third most important thing crossing the border. Why does the humanitarian aspect pale in comparison? Because of its size. No, really. That portion of it is so small!

Over three hundred million people, ninety million cars, and 4 million trucks cross la frontera every year. The border zone is incredibly integrated, even more so than the national economies. Mexicans shop at the big malls in Laredo, send their kids to private schools in El Paso, even drive to see the Buc-ee’s north of San Antonio. Americans cross to get dental crowns, prescription drugs, cosmetic surgery, even cheap daycare. Sometimes the crossing takes a long time, sometimes it’s fast, but it keeps happening every day. And the thing is, all these people go home every night. If they wanted to, they could stay, Americans in Mexico or Mexicans in America. But they don’t. They like their homes, their communities, their culture. They like visiting el otro lado (the other side), and that’s it. This is the daily fact of life along the border, and no politician or party or policy is going to change it.

Depending on the relative economic conditions in both countries, many young Mexican men (mostly) and women (some) head north for better paying jobs. Most do so temporarily, sending those remittances home, saving up money to move back home to Mexico and buy a casa or start a tienda, which earlier they could never hope to do in Mexico. Some stayed in America, like most ethnic arrivals there do. But consider this: is there any other ethnic migration to America that has had as many returnees as Mexico has? Like those living on la frontera, most Mexicans really like being Mexican, living in Mexico, eating Mexican comida and living la cultura de la famila mexicana. Believe me, they respect the United States, they wonder at the United States, they compete in futbol with the United States, and man do they like potato chips and Coca Cola! If all of Mexico really wanted to be in America, they could get here in about a week. Just sayin’.

What about some of the most common fake news themes regarding migrants?

• Taking American jobs? At times, America had worker visas for Mexican migrants to work in the harvest period for various crops, jobs which even 1960s-era American teenagers and twenty-somethings wouldn’t take. It helped to regulate the movement of migrants, and there is still a need for such workers today, even though few Mexicans need those jobs now (it’s mostly other Latinos, now).
• Are migrants a means of drug-trafficking? They were once upon a time, much like bootleg stills were a thing during 1920s Prohibition. But the drug trade is a major multinational business now, and handing fentanyl bricks to desperate, illiterate peasants is not an effective distribution system. So yes, you may find some enterprising coyote ad-libbing with some drugs and migrants on the side, but this is not the drug problem, any more than your batch of home-brew beer is the alcohol problem. A bigger issue is that the narcos realized that due to America’s dysfunctional immigration system, the cartels could use their old cross-border routes to smuggle illegal migrants. Here’s the real genius: the cartels only need to get the migrants across the border–it doesn’t matter if the migrants get caught! The Americans either let the migrants stay, or they return them to Mexico. Either way, the cartels get paid once, or twice, with no downside.
• Are most migrants criminals? Well, by definition, almost all are since they violate some law in crossing the border, a technicality but one worth remembering. You’ll find no group more irritated by illegal immigration than legal immigrants for that very reason, even when talking about their own ethnic relations! But such immigrants are not more likely to commit crimes in America, when considering their economic status. Poor people get desperate. Given that being convicted of a crime is a sure-fire way to get deported, most illegal immigrants are fearful of the American justice system (they also have no experience in a “just” justice system) and are more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators.

What is absolutely true about the number of people migrating into the United States is this: the absolute number America can accept is huge, almost immeasurable. The absolute number your community can accept is small, almost unnoticeable. America is so vast, with so many towns and cities and space, it could easily absorb huge numbers of migrants. But of course, not all at once. Homes and businesses and schools don’t spring up overnight. You can’t integrate people into a country when you can’t even speak their language, let alone know anything about their culture. Mexicans and Americans have been practicing this dance for centuries, and we’re pretty good at it. But now we’re dealing with Venezuelans, Nigerians, Afghans, Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Haitians, et cetera. There is unlimited demand for migration to the United States, because all those peoples realize something many Americans have forgotten: maybe it’s not a bad place after all. There has to be limits, rules, and a line. It is only fair to those who are here, those who already came her, and those who want to come here.

If America can accept many more migrants, it can only do so willingly in the mind of the polis, the public. Migrants are statistics, people happen in real places. When it happens to you, it becomes real. See how quickly those sanctuary cities lost their lofty ideals when the migrants actually took them up on the offer of sanctuary? It is not racist or nationalist to want your neighborhood to be the way it was when you moved there; it’s human.

The sensitivity among some Americans to immigration always appears shortly after an especially large influx. America has five percent of the world’s population and twenty percent of its migrants. Our current forty-five million migrants are more than the next four countries combined. That total represents almost fourteen percent of America’s population, just short of the all-time record of fifteen percent set back in 1890. That’s the period of the Know-Nothings, the anti-Catholic Blaine laws, the Chinese Exclusion Acts, the “Irish need not apply” signs.

People can accept change, but not too much, and not too fast. I live in an area which is sometimes called Gringolandia by locals, as so many American and Canadian expats live here the culture is different than the rest of Mexico. Can it cause some resentment? Yes. Does it create new opportunities? Yes. Is it manageable, if it happens slowly as opposed to in a rush? Yes. If you go into the southside of Chicago (be careful when you do!), you can probably find a ethnic Nigerian-community Catholic Church, with huge murals left of La Guadalupana (from the previous Mexicano worshipers) on the walls in the once-Polish neighborhood parish of St. Stanislaus. Change happens. America is actually good at it. And we need more Americans, wherever they come from!

GUNS

Weapons are the least important thing crossing the border, but they merit consideration, as some (especially in Mexico) contend they are an issue. Let’s see why. In case you haven’t heard, Mexico has a drug-cartel-violence-murder problem. How big a problem? Almost 43,000 homicides last year, putting them in the category of places like South Africa or Syria. Thousands of people go missing, usually the result of cartel attempts at intimidation, recruiting, or vengeance. The cultura of the extended Mexican family means most everybody has a relative involved in the drug trade. Which puts most everybody at some risk. This is also why targeting the cartels hasn’t worked so well for either the American or Mexican governments: you inevitably kill someone’s cousin, which means six new primos are aggrieved.

So are guns fueling the violence in Mexico? Well, if the cartels only had machetes, things might slow down a little, of course. The issue is what type of guns, from where? Mexico’s constitution contains the right to bear arms, just like that in the United States. However, legal weapons here are strictly regulated by type and number and use, and there is only one store, run by the Mexican Army, which retails weapons. Yet guns are everywhere, and so are gun homicides. The fact is, back in the 1970s, the Soviets flooded Central America with hundreds of thousands of cheap, reliable AK47s and other semi-automatic weapons, hoping to spark revolutions and keep the Gringos busy in their backyard. The AK47 is like a diamond: it is forever. Dig it up from a cache, oil it, clean it, and it fires like the day it was made. The AK47 is user- (but not target-) friendly, simple, effective, and plentiful. It is the narcos weapon of choice.

Do cartels import weapons from the United States. Yes. As they have diversified and made more money, cartels have illegally imported more exotic or expensive weapons from America. Some of those weapons are so powerful they over-match the Mexican military, and that’s a real-if-limited problem. Here’s the rub: if the Americans could magically shut down the flow of guns into Mexico tomorrow, the cartels could keep on shooting for decades. Why do some Mexican officials make such a big deal about American guns in Mexico? It is a convenient rejoinder: if the all-powerful American government can’t control guns from its side of the border, how can you expect Mexico to control drugs on its side of the border?

And there’s a statistics problem, too. To respond to the Mexican government’s concerns, the United States funds efforts to track weapons from the United States confiscated during crimes in Mexico. The funding keeps stats on how many are found, but only of those which are likely to be from the USA. Guess what? That’s a numerator without a denominator! So the stats show the number of such guns in Mexico increasing, but not what the relative percentage is. Maybe the number of American guns used in violent crimes in Mexico increased 100% last year. But if the number of American guns in Mexico is only 1% of the total number of guns used in crimes in Mexico, it is irrelevant. NO one knows, although any cartel photo shoot tells a story.

Simple solutions like “build the wall” or “sanctuary cities” are nonsense, and anyone who spouts them should be ignored. The social and economic integration America and Mexico has is an amazing boon for both, and should be fostered, never threatened. There are mutual solutions to the challenges posed by la frontera, but they require both parties in America, and both national governments, to avoid posturing and to give up slogans.